Tuesday, January 19, 2016

We Bought a Farm: Driving to get our culture

We, as a family, love to do "cultural" things. We like museums and history and learning. We love to do school away from the house -- learning all kinds of fun things.

But when you live on a farm, in the country, culture is not knocking at your door.

As we settle more and more into our life here, I am coming to understand that I will be home on the farm a lot. And that we will have to purposefully schedule trips to places a bit of a drive from our house in order to do the types of things we like to do.

We actually bought a membership to a delightful kids' museum in Johnson City. The Hands on Museum is fantastic. It is a perfect two hour event. They have different bite-sized science lessons that the kids can participate in, and they have all kinds of fun things to do on a cold day. As long as I call ahead and assure that it isn't a day that some school is bringing eighteen busloads of kids, we will continue to go regularly. The price of membership is very reasonable, and we have had a blast each time we went.

This is the first time that JB was able to join us for our outing. We met two other homeschool families there and had a wonderful morning.

In a hallway where all your white glows!

Riding in a pretend boat together and all getting along. Well. Sort of. I'm not sure what is happening in the back with Isaac and Abigail.

There was this cool exhibit that would take a picture of your shadow. JB got the boys to pretend to be scared.

One of the favorite things for the kids at this museum is one of those giant "nail" things where you stick your body parts into it and an image molds. Normally, we just randomly play. But with JB there? Time for some adventure. He ended up making a Totem Pole of all of our faces.

Here he and Isaac are reenacting the whole "scary" thing.

They have an art room, and Abigail (who appears to be a budding artist) wanted to draw something and then have Daddy finish the picture. Here she is starting a bug.

And here she is with Daddy's finished product behind her.

Isaac and his robot!

After our morning a the museum, we finished things up by having a yummy lunch at a pizza and sandwich shop across the street.

I'm slowly getting used to the fact that there IS culture where we live, but we will often have to drive into one of the bigger cities to do it. This is not prohibitive. It is just a fact of our new life. This is our life now, and I am okay with it. I just have to plan and embrace living on a farm in the middle of nowhere!

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